Mariano Rajoy Brey, president of the Government of Spain for seven years and leader of the PP for 14, has managed to temporarily avoid the accused in Andorra. The Madrid Justice has agreed with him and has decided to paralyze the processing of the rogatory letter with which a judge from that country intends to investigate him, his friend the former Minister of the Interior Jorge Fernández Díaz and several policemen to explain the methods allegedly used by the political police during his second legislature to obtain compromising information about the former Catalan president, Jordi Pujol, and his family. That Andorran lawsuit sought his appearance as a defendant, the first of his political career, after having always testified as a witness in the Popular Party corruption trials and also shaken any relationship with the Kitchen operation where senior officials of his government are involved.
The head of the PP political brigade is sentenced for trying to adulterate the Pujol case
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So far, Mariano Rajoy’s accounts before the courts have been characterized by having declared to the judges the opposite of what has finally ended up being proven in the sentences that have ratified the accounting in B of his party.
Mariano Rajoy and the Gürtel case
On February 11, 2009, Mariano Rajoy appeared at the headquarters of the PP supported by the National Executive Committee to make his first statements on the Gürtel plot. “It is not a PP plot, but against the Popular Party,” said the opposition leader surrounded by his party’s senior staff, at a time when the conservatives opted for the strategy of blaming the corruption accusations on a maneuver of the socialist government. Eight and a half years later, Mariano Rajoy himself testified in the first major trial of the Gürtel plot, although he did so as Prime Minister.
His statement was not taken into account by the court, which condemned the PP as a participant for profit and considered a parallel accounting as proven. Mariano Rajoy denied having collected that money. Of Bárcenas’ papers, he said, they are “absolutely false” and he even responded to one of the accusations that he had “mistaken for a witness” when asked about this matter. Less than a year later, the National Court ruled in the opposite direction with a sentence
“M. Rajoy”
In 2013, the newspaper El País published the secret accounting of the Popular Party that Luis Bárcenas had kept for years in his office at Génova 13. Some handmade accounts in which “M.Rajoy” appears as the recipient of more than 300,000 euros per year. over 12 years of parallel accounting. Since then, the Justice has endorsed the veracity of these annotations and has declared the existence of a box of black money in the PP proven, but neither Rajoy nor the rest of the high-ranking “popular” officials who appear in the Bárcenas papers have had to respond criminally for this coming and going of hundreds of thousands of euros in cash in envelopes at the party headquarters.
The National Court rejected his accusation from the outset. In 2013, for example, the instructor Pablo Ruz decided that there were no indications to do so at the request of the Manos Limpias pseudo-union and two years later the criminal court also refused to sit him on the bench. In his judicial interventions, Mariano Rajoy, forced to tell the truth like all the witnesses, has been denying the veracity of those notes. These statements have not convinced the judges who have heard him, but no court decided to infer testimony to try him for lying.
It was reflected in the National Court, for example, in its sentence on the first period of the activity of the Gürtel plot. Both Rajoy and Javier Arenas or Francisco Álvarez Cascos denied having collected that money, something that the judges attributed to the consequences that admitting it would have had. “It would mean recognizing the perception of opaque payments for the Public Treasury, which, although it understands that they are not criminal, could be considered by the witnesses as deserving of a social reproach, as well as that in case of recognizing these perceptions they would come to admit the existence of a “box B” within a political formation to which they belong or have belonged”. Therefore, the court said, his testimony was not credible.
Witness box B
The ‘Epoca I’ trial in 2017 was Mariano Rajoy’s judicial debut, but not his last statement as a witness. In March 2021, and this time electronically due to the pandemic, Rajoy appeared before the court that judged the reform of the party headquarters paid for with black money. He appeared to once again deny what the Supreme Court had already declared firmly proven: the existence of a box B in Genoa 13. “There has been no ‘box B’ of the PP, there will be some papers from Bárcenas,” he told the court. court.
His denial was added to that of other PP leaders such as Jose Maria Aznar, who denied having also received cash bonuses and distanced himself from his successor. “I don’t know what the others have done, nor do I care,” he said. As happened in Gürtel’s first major trial, the National Court did not attach too much relevance to these denials about the existence of box B and decided to impose sentences and consider the PP as subsidiary civil liability for the tax crimes committed by its treasurer and which have waived appeal.
The ruling was clear and declared proven, despite what Rajoy said, that Luis Bárcenas “managed the cash funds contributed to the Popular Party political formation as private donations through parallel accounting -B accounting- of whose income and expenditure they were not recorded in the official accounting and therefore they were not audited by the Court of Accounts”. For the second time, a Mariano Rajoy Brey forced to tell the truth signed a statement diametrically opposed to the account of the proven facts of the sentence.
A “cook” to save Rajoy
In 2014, the political brigade supposedly launched an operation to protect Mariano Rajoy from the umpteenth aftershock of the Gürtel earthquake. In this case, the suspicion was that Luis Bárcenas kept compromising recordings for the President of the Government under lock and key and the objective was to get hold of the material before it saw the light. According to Judge Manuel García Castellón, who recently sent the case to trial, the plan put in place by José Manuel Villarejo included the recruitment of Sergio Ríos, driver of the ex-treasurer’s family, who allegedly collected money from the reserved funds to try to get with the recording.
The objective, according to the abbreviated procedure order endorsed by the criminal chamber of the National Court, was to obtain Bárcenas’ documentation and prevent it from reaching the hands of the judge investigating the Gürtel case. “The evils that they have commissioned me to save Barbas’s ass,” Villarejo said in a recorded conversation and alluding to Mariano Rajoy, whom he also called “El Asturiano” in other conversations. Before the judge, he added that he discussed the matter personally with him by phone. Inspector Manuel Morocho recounted how his superiors pressured him so that the name of the President of the Government of his reports.
The instructor decided that it was not necessary to listen to Rajoy or to find out if what Villarejo was saying was true. His closure of the case, unsuccessfully appealed by the Prosecutor’s Office, focused on the police leadership and the Ministry of the Interior with Jorge Fernández Díaz as the highest and only political person responsible for the clandestine operation. He left out of the future trial, even the then general secretary of the PP, María Dolores de Cospedal. Recently, El País and Fuentes Informadas have revealed conversations between the commissioner and the former minister that have led to the popular accusations of PSOE and Podemos to request the reopening of the case.
In this lawsuit, the main beneficiary of the Kitchen operation has not had to give explanations in court for the parapolice operation financed with public funds to save him from the shock wave of the Gürtel case. The same case that ended up expelling him from Moncloa after the party’s first conviction of him as a lucrative participant in the corrupt activity of the plot that ran rampant through public administrations hand in hand with the PP. According to the investigators, Kitchen is another corruption operation concocted by the Ministry of the Interior to cover up the previous corruption of the PP, but neither Rajoy nor any of the senior officials who led the party are going to be tried for it.
Finally, it is an Andorran court that wants him to offer explanations, as a defendant, for one of the most well-known operations of the political brigade: the one dubbed ‘Operation Catalonia’ to obtain compromising information about the Pujol family and open a judicial front against the independence movement. . For the moment, the investigation is paralyzed in the courts of Madrid. It is the only corruption investigation that can still touch Mariano Rajoy.
